Burst pipe leads to grim discoveries on Hurley Street
Apartment complex residents say they'd repeatedly complained about conditions, now residents of one building will be displaced for months
Warning: sensitive images of animal abuse are included in this story.
BEREA — Residents living in an apartment building at 31 Hurley Street have been without power and water for a week as of today — and will soon be removed from their homes indefinitely — after a burst pipe in a vacant upstairs unit flooded another unit below, and ruined an electrical panel.
The City Codes Department has cut off water and electricity to the building until it is brought into compliance by the property owner.
But wonky infrastructure is not the only thing gone wrong at the Hurley Street address, and now county authorities are searching for two former tenants to charge them with multiple offenses, including a felony to do with animal abuse and torture.
Infestations, filth, dead kittens
When a crew from the building’s property management company arrived on Tuesday, December 10th, to clean out the flood damage in Unit #6, they found a vacated roach- and flea-infested apartment stinking with cat urine and covered in black mold, where multiple cats and two dead kittens were among the general filth throughout the entire unit that, to a reporter, smelled of sewage, possibly due to the burst pipe.
But that wasn’t all.
The building is part of a complex of three buildings on the corner of Hurley and Mary streets. When the crew arrived at 31 Hurley, a resident in the building next door at 32 Hurley flagged them down and told them Unit #18 had recently been vacated, but that the tenants had left their cats inside the apartment. When police who had been called to the scene by residents entered that unit, they discovered among the detritus and filth, multiple cats.
Another cat, festering with wounds, was found on the property nearby. Dakota Miller, the Lancaster-based animal rescuer called to the scene by residents, told The Edge that it had belonged to the tenants who vacated Unit #18.
“There were four other cats in that apartment, but they got out when the police arrived,” Miller said.
“These units were absolutely the worst conditions I have ever seen since I started property management in 2011,” Tyler Oatts, owner of Realiant Property Management in Nicholasville, told The Edge. “And I have seen quite a bit of nasty stuff … this is about as bad as it gets.”
Oatts said the property at Hurley Street is the only commercial property his company manages in Berea.
Animal cruelty
In Kentucky, it is a felony to torture a dog or cat. Of the many forms of such torture listed by the State, abandoning a pet in a building for three days or more without making provisions for their care is among them.
Whoever vacated Unit #18 is guilty of this, according to Madison County Animal Control Officer Victoria Thompson, who responded to the Berea Police Department’s call for help managing the cats. “It’s cruelty to animals in the first degree,” she told The Edge.
Thompson said that another resident confirmed the cats had been left alone in the apartment for more than three days.
Among a multitude of other pet-related offenses to be charged, at least against the tenant from Unit #6, is creating a breeding ground for pests, according to Thompson. “The entire apartment was filled with fleas and roaches, and gnats,” she said.
Thompson also said that had many of the cats not escaped Unit #6 when the workers entered to clean it, that tenant likely would also have been charged with a felony for animal torture.
“[The tenant was] only gone for less than a day before management got there and started cleaning it out,” Thompson said. “They’re just lucky. Lucky it wasn’t three days.”
Oatts said the current whereabouts of the tenants from Unit #18 and Unit #6 are unknown.
In all, Thompson said Animal Control failed to round up the cats that had escaped, but that they were able to recover three cats from each apartment, all of them in various states of physical distress, ranging from fairly healthy to dire, and one sickly kitten found among the two dead ones in Unit #6. Thompson said the sickly kitten is being fostered by an Animal Control employee and is making progress.
Thompson also said charges in both cases are expected to be filed imminently through the Madison County Sheriff’s Department.
Under new management
The apartment complex was listed at 2.2 million dollars in June and purchased in October for 1.75 million dollars, by the Murphy, N.C.-based Modern Capital, LLC, according to county property value records and the MLS (Multiple Listing Service, an electronic records tool used by realtors).
County property value records also list David and Mary Brockman and Leo Rabinovich as the previous owners. All three are associated with DJFL Properties, LLC, which has a Waco, Ky., post office box listed as its address. Lori Simpson, also of Waco, is listed in public records as a member of DJFL Properties, LLC. Several residents of 31 Hurley told The Edge that under the previous ownership, they dealt directly with Simpson.
The Edge was unable to reach any of the sellers of the apartment complex. An email to the buyer remained unanswered at the time of publication.
There are eight units in the troubled building, two of which are vacant, according to Oatts, who added that the events of this week have also unearthed that a third unit was vacated by its actual lease holder months ago. A squatter has been living there instead.
“There has been no rent paid by that unit since we took over and we were never notified that the actual tenant had moved out months ago,” Oatts told The Edge.
Oatts and his associates have been managing the Hurley Street buildings for about six weeks, right after the buyer closed the sale on October 28th.
Building rehab will take months
A Realiant crew has been working on the property all week, and Oatts said he has been soliciting bids from contractors who can help to bring the building up to code quickly. That has proven frustrating, said Oatts, in part because Realiant’s pool of contractors tend to be in Northern Kentucky and Southern Ohio, where the bulk of Realiant’s managed properties are located.
Worse, said Oatts, is that an assessment given yesterday by both a local Berea electrician and a City inspector is that the electrical issues alone will take up to three months to fully address, meaning that tenants will be unable to return home for at least that long. A member of the Codes Department confirmed this assessment to The Edge.
Stephen L. Marshall, a Lexington attorney specializing in landlord/tenant issues in Kentucky, and who represents Realiant, told The Edge in an email:
“My client only recently began managing these properties after a change in ownership. The new owner recognized the unacceptable condition of the properties and wants to begin to renovate them immediately. Unfortunately, that cannot be accomplished while they are occupied. So, the new owner was faced with the Hobson’s choice of allowing the properties to continue to deteriorate, perhaps to an extent where they became unsafe for habitation, or to remove the tenants and begin rebuilding the properties.”
Communication chaos
When the Codes Department cut the utilities to 31 Hurley, several residents told The Edge that they did not know who to call for more information. Several sources said that some residents tried contacting the previous owners, unaware of Realiant’s new role in their lives.
For his part, Oatts told The Edge that when his company took over managing the property, he went door-to-door to introduce himself and offer his contact information. If the residents didn’t come to the door, Oatts said he taped a notification to their door. “That’s standard procedure,” he said.
Oatts also said in a text that phone and email records provided by the previous owners were largely inaccurate. He also said no residents had directly notified him or his office about the smells and infestations from Unit #6 or #18.
Many residents did tell him, however, that the previous owners did not have a track record of responding to complaints. “Most of all the tenants I talked to … said they enjoyed living there but most everyone said the previous owner never fixed anything,” Oatts told The Edge in a text.
Rooms at the inn
Competing narratives exist among the various parties as to whether and when tenants were informed of the details of their situation and what they could do about it, but by Monday evening, after Lexington CBS affiliate WKYT led its 11:00 PM news with a story about the tenants’ plight, it became public that there were rooms reserved by Realiant at a local motel for those affected who did not have other accommodations.
Sunny Patel, owner of the Knight’s Inn on Route 25, told The Edge that Realiant contacted him on Sunday to reserve and pay for rooms for any tenants requesting them. At present, Patel said that since Monday, December 9th, four residents of 31 Hurley have come to stay at his inn.
Both Oatts and Berea’s codes and planning administrator, Amanda Haney, confirmed that they are communicating frequently in efforts to restore the building as quickly as possible, but that obstacles such as the property owner’s intermittent availability due to travel and the novelty of the situation has delayed the process.
Haney, whose department initially responded to the scene regarding the burst pipe and electrical panel, said she was unaware of the level of degradation in units #6 and #18 until informed by The Edge. Subsequently, the City has returned to inspect the building anew.
“It is a very unfortunate and unusual incident,” Haney told The Edge. “It is very much not what we are used to seeing in Berea.”
As such, there is no City precedent for how to address the homelessness created by the utilities having been cut, nor is there an allocation in the City’s budget for such events, according to Haney.
The property’s new owner has agreed to pay for temporary housing for now, according to Oatts. “We offered everyone staying in that building, including the squatter, the hotel. We didn’t know she was a squatter [at the time],” Oatts said.
The displaced tenants’ housing accommodations will be re-evaluated when a plan is in place for rehabilitating the building, Oatts said.
Building’s breakdown took time
How such fetid conditions could have remained unaddressed for so long at the Hurley Street address is as yet unclear.
“This was a long time in the making,” Oatts told The Edge. “This didn’t happen since the new owner bought it.”
Although The Edge was unable to reach the new owner, multiple sources confirmed that the buyer did not purchase the property site-unseen, and that an inspection of the property was completed prior to the sale.
The Edge spoke with three building inspectors in the region about whether an inspection would have detected the issues now apparent at the complex, but none of them would go on the record, all citing the litigiousness of the real estate industry.
However, they did all speak on background, and all three gave the same information. Commercial real estate inspections can take many forms, they all said, depending upon what the client requests. For that reason, it would be difficult to know whether the problems at 31 Hurley Street now evident were clear before the building’s sale.
Also, each noted that code inspections are not building inspections. By law, only an official municipal codes inspector can state unequivocally that something is not up to code. Building inspectors can, however, alert a client that something might be problematic.
Currently, the City is still determining the extent of the decrepit conditions at the Hurley Street complex, in order to know what must be done before residents can return to their homes.
“The building will have to be made livable before we can allow it to be occupied,” Melissa Isaacs, an administrative assistant who works with Haney in the Codes Department, told The Edge. “It could be a lengthy process.”
Isaacs added that, according to state tenancy laws, it would have been impossible for anyone, including City officials, to know the actual conditions of the apartments in question, without having been granted access by the tenants.
Unanswered maintenance requests
Several residents of both 31 and 32 Hurley Street told The Edge their stories of unanswered maintenance requests put to Simpson over the years.
“I told Lori about the unsafe stairs as soon as I moved in,” Jeffrey Riner told The Edge. “I also told her about rain leaking from the gutter into the electric meter.”
Riner said the complaints were never addressed by Simpson. Riney told The Edge he is the tenant who called WKYT after he said he did not receive word about what was happening to his home and when utilities would be restored.
Another resident claimed Simpson was aware of the pest infestation caused by the hordes of cats.
“She’s talked about it, Lori has, in person. She said that’s the reason that there’s pest issues. That’s the reason other people are complaining about mice and roaches,” Mia Helmer, who has lived at 32 Hurley Street for two years, told The Edge.
Helmer said to her knowledge, Simpson never addressed the issue of the cats head on. “I don't think she wanted to deal with it. She sold it to the new property management (sic; it sold to the owners). She just let them deal with it,” Helmer said.
Helmer also told The Edge of electrical outlets in her apartment that hang from the wall and shoot sparks whenever she tries to plug something in to them, tripping the circuit breaker. “I just quit using them,” she said.
Multiple complaints about the wiring in her apartment were only partially addressed by Simpson’s husband, “Frankie”, according to Helmer, who said he handled all maintenance requests that did not require a ladder.
“He said the wiring was hot and shouldn’t be connected like that,” Helmer said, adding that the wiring was not subsequently corrected.
Ongoing story
This is a developing story, and The Edge is continuing to report on it. If you have any information about these buildings and their condition, or about the cats’ previous owners, kindly contact The Edge.